Diddy was waiting for Carrie and Slattery at a dimly lit table in the back of Nancy Whiskey’s. It was late afternoon now, and the after-work crowd was straggling in. A pair of TVs was showing rugby games, the shuffleboard tables were doing business and AC/DC was pounding out “Safe in New York City” on half a dozen speakers spread around the pub, ringing off the brown tin ceiling as Max and Carrie came through the door. Diddy looked both nervous and excited. Before he had a chance to say anything, Max whistled up a waitress and ordered double orders of wings and rings and a pitcher of St. Pauli Girl.
The food and beer arrived. Max poured everyone tall glasses of the ice-cold beer, then bit into one of the onion rings. “Talk.”
The noise level in the pub meant that they had to lean forward to hear one another, but the blaring of the televisions, the music and the cheering sections around the shuffleboard players also ensured a level of privacy.
“You might not notice it unless you worked around computers a lot, but right from the start I had a feeling. Little jumps and jerks in the programs, lags that shouldn’t have been there. The ghost in the machine. You know what I mean?”
“No,” said Max flatly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He took another onion ring and dipped a chicken wing into the accompanying bowl of barbecue sauce. He chewed through the onion ring and started on the wing.
“Think of it in terms of the echo you used to get on old-fashioned phone taps,” said Diddy.
Max sucked the meat off a wing and started on another. “Okay, now I’m with you.”
“It was that kind of feeling. So I ran a few checks. Then I ran a few more. I found Spector CNE on all the computers in the office, and Net-Vizor as well.”
“Which means?”
“Which means someone’s monitoring and recording everything that we do on every computer in the office.”
“Who?”
“I’m working on it,” said Diddy. He tried one of the onion rings and took a tentative sip of beer.
“Anything else?”
“The phones.”
“What about them?”
“They’re being monitored. There’s some kind of CO/REMOBS activity on both the phone lines and the cable for the Internet.”
“Say what?” Max asked.
“CO/REMOBS,” said Diddy. “Central office remote observance. Somebody’s actually tapped into the local switching computer at the phone company and is redirecting all the calls to some remote location, where the conversations are monitored or recorded or both.”
“Take a lot of pull,” said Max, chewing thoughtfully on another wing. Carrie gave up, took one off the plate and dipped it into the blue cheese dressing.
“Like LinCorp?”
“They own the cable company we’re using for the Internet hookup,” said Diddy.
“So they’re watching us,” said Max. He signaled to the waitress for another pitcher of St. Pauli Girl.
“Literally.” Diddy nodded.
“Cameras?” asked Carrie.
“Everywhere,” answered the young cop. “Wireless pinholes in every room.”
“What kind of range are we talking about?” Max asked.
“With LinCorp’s resources? Almost infinite. They could be watching us from Rangoon if they wanted to.”
“Any way to find out?” Carrie asked, taking an onion ring.
“It would take time, and they’d probably be able to figure out what we were doing.”
“The question,” said Max, vacuuming up another wing, “is why they’re doing it in the first place.” He dropped the stripped bone into the bowl provided for the purpose and switched to onion rings for a while, thinking it through. “We find a mummy from the Civil War, and that gets everyone’s gonads into a sheepshank?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s a multimillion-dollar project. We know what happened at the African Burial Ground.”
“A park where they wanted a building,” said Diddy.
“Maybe LinCorp’s thinking the same thing.”
“Too late for that,” said Max, shaking his head. He batted crumbs off his tie with a paper napkin and went back to wings. “They would have snuffed this thing out by now. Bribed you maybe, shut you down for a day or two and brought in the backhoes for a bit of smoothing over. Who knows? But they could have done it.”
“Maybe they’re worried about the other guy,” said Carrie.
“What other guy?” Slattery asked, licking sauce off his fingers.
“The brother other guy,” said Diddy. “Mr. James Washington Stone.”
“Now, there’s a thought,” said Slattery, leaning against the back of the chair. Stone was the Spike Lee of the documentary. His first film, White Nigger, done while he was getting his doctorate at Columbia and based on the O. J. Simpson trial, had put him in the spotlight, and a series of other critically acclaimed race-related films had kept him there. The year before, he’d won an Oscar for Black Is a Country, a biography of Amiri Baraka, the sixties’ radical and beat poet once known by the name LeRoi Jones. On the strength of the Academy Award, he’d launched a mock campaign against Henry Todd Lincoln that had quickly morphed into a groundswell of support, and now the two men were in what was quickly becoming a dead heat.
“They’re trying to bury this until after the election?” Carrie said. She picked up another onion ring and dipped it into the blue cheese.
“Bad pun.” Diddy smiled.
“That’s disgusting,” said Max.
“A cover-up?” Carrie said.
“No, dipping an onion ring into blue cheese dressing.”
Diddy tried the same thing. “Not bad.” He nodded.
“You’re both disgusting.”
“But are we right?” Diddy asked.
“LinCorp covers up the body of the dead Civil War sailor because it obviously has something to do with the New York Draft Riots of 1863,” said Carrie. “There’s no doubt Stone would get a lot of publicity even without—” She paused.
“Without what?” Diddy asked.
“There’s been a series of murders over the last three months,” said Max. “All the bodies have had their lips glued shut and all of the bodies had recently eaten a chocolate coin in a gold foil wrapper. The coins were replicas of an 1863 Liberty gold piece.”
“How many murders?”
“Eight.”
“So there’s already a cover-up,” said Diddy. “A serial killer on the loose without the New York Post doing front-page headlines?”
“I think One Police Plaza is treading carefully. Lincoln is very pro-cop. If he’s elected, there’s going to be a lot more of New York’s Finest on the beat. He’s promised all the SWAT guys Hummers, among other things.”
“It still doesn’t explain why they bugged everything in the office,” said Carrie. She headed toward the blue cheese dressing with one of the fat, crunchy onion rings, but a look from Max stopped her. She opted for a sprinkle of salt instead.
“They think we’re going to find out something,” said Max. “They want to find out about it before anyone else.”
“What could we find?” Carrie asked. “The guy’s been dead for a hundred and fifty years.”
“The chocolate coins, remember?” Max answered. “There has to be a connection.”
“A coincidence?” Diddy suggested.
Max gave the young cop a frosty glance. “No such thing.” He blew out a long breath, leaned back and closed his eyes. “The body’s found in the basement of a LinCorp property. The body definitely dates from 1863. The body is African-American. He was apparently a crew member on the Monitor. The body had an 1863 Liberty gold piece in his gut. Chocolate 1863 Liberty gold pieces were found in the stomach contents of eight present-day homicides. LinCorp obviously sees a connection or a threat, because they’ve got us bugged.” He opened his eyes. “When’s the election?”
“Two weeks,” answered Diddy promptly. “July thirteenth, to be exact.”
“When were the New York Draft Riots?” Max asked.
“July thirteenth,” said Carrie. “To be exact.”
“No coincidence,” said Max. “This is really beginning to stink.”
Then Carrie’s cell phone twittered and everything changed.